Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

The evangelical creation care movement, though almost invisible to many, has been around for quite a few years.  One of its most visible historical markers is probably the founding of Au Sable Institute in 1979, thirty-three years ago now – but well before that date there were many individuals and a few small organizations seeking to promote what was then called ‘Christian environmental stewardship.’  There are many more of us now, and there is a lot of good work going on, but we still fly below the radar in most cases.

So it was enlightening and important that many of the current key players in this movement were on the phone together last week to share what we’re all doing, and perhaps more to the point, what God is doing to continue to foster and strengthen this movement.

Here’s a brief summary with bullet points of the highlights.  [If you’d like to hear a recording of the phone call yourself, just call  (507) 726-4220 and choose to listen to recording #1.]  Read more »

Subtitle: The Mission Field as field. . . and forest and river and mountain and topsoil

by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

Ed has asked me to re-post this article from a recent issue of our Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, in particular as a means to discuss one way in which

Pray to Jesus for Tiger Protection: The people of the Sunderbans Mangroves (#139), from the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest

creation care can affect how the Church goes about doing missions: evangelism, discipleship, and church-planting.  “Go and make disciples of ta ethne, all nations,” the Great Commission says.   Even the Greek renderings of the words indicate that making disciples occurs among ethnic groups, or people groups.  Political nations may grant missionaries their passports and entry visas, but ministry occurs among smaller cultural and linguistic communities.  But what about ministry in something we would define as ecoregions?  To what extent should the local biosphere inform how we preach the Gospel to a particular people group?

A 1982 Lausanne Committee meeting in Chicago offered the following definition of a people group:  “A significantly large ethnic or sociological grouping of individuals who perceive themselves to have a common affinity for one another. For evangelistic purposes, it is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.”  A creation care perspective looks at this definition from a number of assumptions.  One is that these “individuals” are homo sapiens, and thus not disembodied souls floating in a simple construct of culture and language.  People live, and they live somewhere.  That physical “somewhere” means something; it creates a valid “common affinity for one another.”  It also greatly affects how one hears and interacts with the Gospel.

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